Transcript The Changing Landscape of Programming Technology Karl Lieberherr Northeastern University Friends of Switzerland Swiss connection • PhD from ETH Zurich: Pascal, Modula, Oberon (Wirth) • Sabbatical 2000

The Changing Landscape of
Programming Technology
Karl Lieberherr
Northeastern University
Friends of Switzerland
1
Swiss connection
• PhD from ETH Zurich: Pascal, Modula,
Oberon (Wirth)
• Sabbatical 2000 with UBS Zurich
• Sabbatical 2006 with Novartis
• Collaborations with ABB and MettlerToledo
• One Swiss PhD
• Yearly summer vacation in Switzerland
Friends of Switzerland
2
How I came to Boston
• 1983: GTE in Waltham, now Verizon
• 1985: tenured full professor at
Northeastern
• I like it here!
Friends of Switzerland
3
Goal
• We want reliable and secure software.
• No technical vulnerabilities.
• Not enough: social vulnerabilities are also
very important in the age of the web.
Friends of Switzerland
4
Outline
• Program Organization
– Crosscutting Concerns
– Law of Demeter
• Programming Team Organization
– Extreme Programming
• Security:
– Social Phishing
– SAT solvers
Friends of Switzerland
5
Software bugs
• Excel 2007 multiplication bug: September
2007
– 850 * 77.1 should be 65535 but displays as
100000.
Friends of Switzerland
6
Program Organization
• cross-cutting concerns
• the tyranny of the primary decomposition
– organize software into modules
• group functionality that lives in several
modules
Friends of Switzerland
7
Law of Demeter
• Organization principle for objects
– “talk only to your friends”
– “each object talks only to a limited number of
other objects”
– avoids information overload for the
programmer
– from Northeastern
• Leads to objects that are easier to change
Friends of Switzerland
8
Extreme Programming
• Planning around User Stories
• Small Releases of Functionality
• Simple Design
– build what is asked for, no design for the
future
• Continuous testing
Friends of Switzerland
9
Extreme Programming
• Pair Programming
• Collective Product (Code) Ownership
– Design, Coding Standards
• Continuous integration
• On-site Customer Representative
Friends of Switzerland
10
SAT Solvers
•
•
•
•
a fundamental topic in computer science
express your “wishes”
computer satisfies as many as possible
used for software and hardware
verification
• based on learning from mistakes (nonchronological backtracking)
• can solve systems with over 100000
parameters (variables)
Friends of Switzerland
11
Social Phishing
• friendly email message tempts recipients
to reveal more online than they otherwise
would.
• impersonating a trustworthy entity
Friends of Switzerland
12
class project at Johns Hopkins
• find publicly available information from
social networks: MySpace, Facebook,
LinkedIn.
• how can a phisher exploit social network
data? very easily and effectively
• over four times as likely to become a
victim if they are solicited by someone
appearing to be a known acquaintance
Friends of Switzerland
13
Observations
• 77% females, 65% males
• But trick males by sending them a spoofed
message appearing to come from a
female (68% if message from female
versus 53% if from another male)
• somewhat reassuringly: computer science
students were the least vulnerable
Friends of Switzerland
14
Observations: observed reactions
after debriefing message
• Anger
– significant social cost to victims
• Denial
– we find it difficult to admit our own
vulnerability: many successful phishing
attacks go unreported
Friends of Switzerland
15
Conclusions
• Still a very exciting time in computer and
information science.
• Computer science students have excellent
job prospects, despite outsourcing.
Friends of Switzerland
16